For those weary of parsing which part of the post-Dirty Harry, post-Tarantino cops and robbers homage is demonstrating its fondness for the genre and which is just declaring it, writer and director John Michael McDonagh's The Guard is more exhausting than entertaining. Ideally one would have better things to do while in the act of watching a movie -- like say watching the movie -- but from its assaultive, nihilistic prologue to its last flat invocation of American culture, The Guard foregrounds the extent to which it is leaning on artifice and affect to get over.
Like the recent Perrier's Bounty, The Guard feels like it might play better at home than overseas. Brendan Gleeson, who stars in both films, here plays Sergeant Gerry Boyle, an amoral crank in a two-cop Irish outpost. When a kid turns up dead in what appears to be a gang hit, Boyle and his do-right young colleague (Rory Keenan) are drawn into a larger, "international drug smuggling" investigation. American FBI agent Wendell Everett (Don Cheadle) is also called over, and in the nick of time: Gleeson and his strawberry granite head have seconds to spare before the combination of his pointless repellence and McDonagh's drain-circling jokes emergency eject the audience out over the Irish sea.
From there The Guard is never quite as amusing as it thinks it is, but some breathing room opens up around Boyle's anti-charisma, and the pace picks up quite nicely. Boyle is thrice the cop of his Dublin overlords, naturally, and holds them in contempt. What he does have to lose -- his angelic mum (Fionnula Flanagan) -- is on the wrong side of a terminal cancer diagnosis, and their scenes allow him to step out of McDonagh's extreme angles and glib one-liners. Agent Everett gets a dose of Irish insularity when he attempts a door-to-door questioning in the Gaellic countryside, while Boyle spends his days off being entertained by Dublin's finest prostitutes, shipped in special.
The odd couple don't spend enough time together to get much of a rapport going, which is a shame, because their scenes together have the spike of something real, and even Gleeson's Irish rube teasing eventually squeezes out a laugh. Cheadle is on the less fortunate end of McDonagh's script: Instead of connecting, lines like "I can't tell if you're really motherfucking dumb, or really motherfucking smart," and "You certainly are an unconventional police officer, Sergeant Boyle," open up the question of whether it's weak writing or a failure to access the proper combination of reference and irony that left you so cold.
Mark Strong, Liam Cunningham, and David Wilmot show up as the heavies, and each one gets a moment to duet with their archetype: Strong has to inform two daft police officers of "the dynamic of the situation" as he's paying them off; Cunningham gets freaked out by a jukebox ditty in the middle of blackmailing Boyle; and Wilmot gets so comfortable in his role of psychopathic hitman that he forgets himself in the clinch. The whinging about the English and nods to bitter Irish regionalism (there's a wicked bit of IRA business too) will go over well at home, and in fact comprise much of the film's charm for the rest of us. Ideally McDonagh's influences would have enhanced The Guard's considerable homegrown appeal instead of sucking it dry.